


The Prophet of 1995

by vachtar



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Theoretically maybe canon-compliant, childhood meetings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:21:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27933001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vachtar/pseuds/vachtar
Summary: Mary Keay visits the Sims residence about a book; she brings her young son along.
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 8
Kudos: 49
Collections: Mild Heart Attack 2020: Short Treats Collection





	The Prophet of 1995

**Author's Note:**

  * For [graveExcitement](https://archiveofourown.org/users/graveExcitement/gifts).



> A small (and slightly late) pinch-hitter treat for the Heart Attack Exchange. I hope you like it!
> 
> Title, with alteration, from Children's Work by Dessa.

“Jonathan.”

His grandmother inclined her head towards the stairs and gave him a firm look. Jon paused, mid-step, and pivoted away from the kitchen guiltily. He’d only meant to grab a biscuit to eat while he read, but his grandmother was firmly of the mind that eating before dinner would ruin a child’s appetite and stunt his growth (and possibly brain development?) so he had to do it stealthily. Except apparently this time he wasn’t quiet enough.

“Go on then.” He slipped past her in the narrow hallway, catching a faceful of her cloying perfume as he went. It was only then he realized she wasn’t alone.

The woman standing behind her was petite; his grandmother was hardly large, but even she dwarfed her guest. Dressed neatly, but plainly, and her hair was in a glossy chignon at the back of her head. She smiled as he passed and it made Jon feel suddenly queasy.

“About the book, Mrs. Sims...” the woman began, turning away from him.

Jon sprinted for the stairs, and found his heart thudding unevenly by the time he was barricaded in his room. This was stupid; she was only an old woman, probably a friend of his grandmother’s from church or book club or some other place old women congregated. Her shark-like grin and the mean gleam in her eyes were simply the product of an overactive imagination, like his grandmother always accused him of possessing. It didn’t mean anything.

He fumbled his book out from under his elbow. It was one of the new ones she’d picked up for him, a big stack of odds and ends from the charity shop. This one was eighteenth in its series, according to the scuffed spine. That was fine. She tended to just sweep a bunch of things off the shelves at random, but he read all of them anyways.

He paused before climbing into bed. It looked exactly the same as he’d left it this morning; rumpled duvet, sideways pillow. His hand throbbed for a second before he realized he was squeezing hard at the book and loosened the grip. This was stupid, he was being an idiot; there was nothing to be afraid of. He glanced behind him at the firmly shut door, and chewed at his lip, and then dropped down to scoot his way under the bed instead.

It had been awhile since he’d done this. Right after what he privately thought of as _the incident_ with Mister Spider, he’d slept under here for weeks. If his grandmother noticed, she didn’t feel it was worth bringing up with him. But the impulse had faded, the farther out he got and the more he rationalized that he couldn’t possibly have seen what he knew he’d seen. So the underbed had accumulated a fresh layer of dust, and it made him wipe his glasses and also sneeze after he’d wriggled into place.

There was enough light to read by still, if he angled the book carefully. Plus, with his ear pressed directly against the floor, he could almost hear his grandmother and her guest in the kitchen. Not well enough to make out words, just the quiet hum and mumble of living breathing people nearby, and his nerves slowly began to settle.

A knock came at the door - two solid raps in a row. _Knock, knock._

Jon’s throat seized and he slammed the book shut. He could only see a few inches below the overhanging duvet, and he stared in a blind panic at the bottom of the door. After a moment, the knock came again, and then the doorknob rattled, and it opened.

Trainers and the hems of a pair of jeans stepped into his room. Those certainly didn’t belong to his grandmother or her guest. The trainers walked into the middle of the room and paused, making a leisurely circle on the rug, before taking another step towards the bed.

Jon held his breath, teeth sawing at his lip and his eyes burning but he didn’t dare close them even to blink. For a dizzy second there were too many limbs moving towards him - and were they wearing shoes at all, or were they capped with stiff fur and tarsal claws? And then they reached the bed and the figure crouched down to peer at him.

“What are you doing under there?” the figure asked.

Jon didn’t think. He flung his book vaguely in their direction and scrambled towards the bottom of the bed and out, bouncing his shin off one of the legs as he went. The book had landed in a face-down pile with half the pages folded up under it and clearly had not hit the figure at all. The figure, in turn, was a boy around Jon’s age, staring at Jon like he was the weird one sneaking into other people’s bedrooms and looking under their beds.

He supposed it wasn’t sneaking, technically, because the boy did knock. But that was beside the point.

“Who are you?” Jon asked, feeling proud of the way his voice barely quavered. The boy stood up and dusted off the knees of his trousers.

“Gerard. You’re Jonathan, right? Your nan said I should come up here.”

“My nan - how do you know my nan?”

“I don’t. My mum does, or she found her somewhere, I don’t know. She just brought me along.” Gerard sat down on Jon’s bed and kicked his feet out in front of him. Now that Jon could see him clearly and also wasn’t about to climb out the window in terror, Gerard was actually probably a little older, with hair the same shade as the smiling woman’s and the kind of long-limbed gawkiness that Jon associated with not-quite-teenagers.

“Brought you along for what?” he asked.

“Book sale, I guess. That’s what my mum does, is collect rare books. And sells them. Got a shop in Morden. She’s always on the hunt for something or other. I guess your nan has a book she wants.” Jon’s grandmother’s house was full of books, but nothing he’d seen that he thought anyone would put time or effort into. She mostly read novels about dull women falling in love with dull men, and sometimes the man was a billionaire or a duke or something. There were a few shelves with books he’d been told belonged to his grandfather before he passed, but those were all military history and books about sailboats. He related his skepticism to Gerard as he gingerly retrieved his thrown book and sat down on the bed beside him. Gerard shrugged.

“Probably not any of those, yeah. But you never know. Last year she took a plane to Shanghai and came back with a book about candlefish. Those don’t even live in Shanghai, I looked it up.”

Jon frowned at his socked feet. “I don’t think my grandmother has any books like that either.”

“Maybe not. Maybe she inherited it from someone. We get a lot of books people had just sitting in a box somewhere. I don’t know how my mum knows where to find them.”

That was a possibility. She didn’t talk about her son and his wife much, but there were still some boxes of their things in the hall closet, a few pictures on the mantel. Maybe one of them had owned something valuable and it had been sitting, secret, a few meters away from him for years. He rather liked the thought.

“Why does she bring you along?” Jon asked, and remembered only after the words had slipped out that that was probably something rude to ask and he’d been lectured plenty about rudeness. Gerard didn’t seem to mind. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers and leaned back until the base of his skull pressed uncomfortably against the wall and kicked his legs out in front of him.

“She doesn’t always. Sometimes I stay with someone if it’s more trouble to bring me along. Like Shanghai. But she likes having the extra help.” His eyes slid over to Jon, evaluating for a second. “Once she had me steal a book and run out with it while she distracted the owner. Said he wasn’t planning on giving it up.”

Jon stared in open wonder. “Your _mum_ had you _steal something?_ ” he squeaked out. “Something _valuable?_ ” Gerard grinned. In the back of his mouth was a gap where a tooth had fallen out and its replacement hadn’t fully grown in yet; Jon had a similar one, an incisor, and he absently poked at it with his tongue.

“I had to climb out a window because the door was locked. I think she just brought me to that one because I was small enough to fit. The guy was really paranoid.”

“You stole his book, I think it’s not paranoia if it’s true.” They were quiet a moment, Gerard looking pleased with himself, Jon turning over the existence of parents who have their children commit crimes for them in his head. “Hang on,” he blurted, “why doesn’t she just leave you with your dad, though?”

Gerard shrugged again and glanced away. “Well, he’s dead, so that wouldn’t really help anything.”

“Oh. Mine too. Dead, I mean, my parents,” Jon fumbled. Usually the orphan bit led to awkwardness or teasing, depending on who had heard, but Gerard just nodded like that was perfectly normal.

“You’ve got your nan at least.” Jon wished very suddenly that he was still below the bed with his ear to the floor, listening to the comforting, distant noise of his grandmother puttering in the kitchen, knocking together breakfast or making a cup of tea for herself.

“Yeah, I suppose I do.”

They lapsed into quiet again, Gerard with his neck still jammed at an angle against the wall, Jon picking at the fabric of his trousers. He eyed the window; outside it was getting dark and cold. Realistically it wasn’t that late, but his grandmother down alone in the kitchen with that strange woman - a part of him wanted to run right down and fling the door open and see whatever was happening. Whatever deal she was making.

The larger part of him admonished that thought for being stupid and likely only to get him scolded. Gerard seemed calm enough. If his mum were planning to steal something from Jon’s grandmother, her accomplice was clearly not involved. It was probably just that whatever book had belonged to his dad, and she was feeling sentimental about parting with it and didn’t want Jon to see. That sounded about right.

“The books your mum buys,” he started. “Are they...special at all?”

“How so?” asked Gerard, but he looked like he already knew what Jon meant.

“I don’t know. Just, different. Have you ever seen any you couldn’t explain?”

“I think so. Some of them are just old and rare, but some of them are weird. Like, there was one that changed every time I looked at it. I used to think someone, my mum was just drawing more things in it, but I’m not sure. I think it might’ve been doing it on its own.” Gerard chewed subconsciously at his thumbnail as he spoke, staring at the wall opposite.

Jon’s hands were beginning to shake slightly. He’d thought the memory of Mister Spider was beginning to scar over but here, presented with someone who might actually believe him, the fear felt like a newly opened wound. He opened his mouth, not sure if he would actually be able to bring himself to speak.

The door opened. Jon’s grandmother never knocked; a fact he was grateful for nowadays, even if it did mean he jumped in surprise at times. She peered inside at Gerard. “Your mother and I are finished.” Gerard nodded and slid off the bed without a word. Jon followed, trying to match his long steps.

Downstairs, Gerard’s mum stood with a parcel in her hands, wrapped in old newsprint. She smiled at them as they came down the stairs, and her eyes made Jon feel all greasy and uncomfortable inside. “Come along, Gerard, we’ve impinged on Mrs. Sims’ hospitality long enough.”

His grandmother waved the comment away, making polite chatter about how it was no problem at all, really, in fact this was practically a favor she was doing her, but even as she said it she was bustling Gerard and his mum towards the door. There was a frisson of nerves under her voice; different from when Mrs. Foster chatted too long after tea and his grandmother just wanted her out. This was something worse. She kept glancing over her shoulder, as if something might still be there in the kitchen, and her eyes slid like oil over water and refused to look at the parcel in Gerard’s mum’s hands.

Jon held the door for them. Gerard waved from the doorstep, and his mum nodded her head at Jon, and he almost had the world shut out again when she called out, “Wait a moment, Jonathan.”

He froze. Gerard’s mum had turned back and paused. She waved him outside, rummaging with her other hand for something in the heavy bag slung over her shoulder. She retrieved a slim tract with a blue binding and pushed it into his hands. The cover read ‘OBLITUS’ in careful, blunt print. It didn’t look particularly old or rare. Over her shoulder, Gerard’s mouth curled down and he stared at Jon as if memorizing his face. He looked terribly sad.

“Your grandmother said you like reading. I think you’ll enjoy this one.” That terrible smile surfaced briefly, and then she was off, guiding Gerard - holding the newsprint-wrapped parcel - down the street beside her. Jon turned back to his house, the shining eyes of its windows and the warm breath of air coming from inside. He slid the deadbolt shut behind him and checked with a tug to make sure that the door was solidly locked.

From the entryway he could hear his grandmother in the kitchen, what sounded like cups being tidied and a nervous humming. He crept back up the stairs to his bedroom to read his new book.

**Author's Note:**

> oblitus - forgotten


End file.
